The fault location on a transmission line plays a very important role in power system operation. The accurate and fast fault location results on the transmission lines are particularly important in minimizing operating costs and maximizing power system reliability. In this paper, the fault location problem is proposed to transform into the optimization problem solved by optimization algorithms. It is realized that most fault location procedures highly depend on transmission line parameters which are always time-varying under various operation conditions. The inaccuracy of the transmission line parameters greatly affects the fault location results. Thus, these parameters are proposed to estimate for variations. Moreover, when faults occur near the transmission line terminals, the fault currents are high. Then, a current transformer (CT) saturation and a secondary current distortion happen in the transmission system also affecting the accuracy of the fault location results. Instead of measuring the currents affected by the CT saturation, the currents are proposed to estimate for inputting the fault location procedure. In this paper, advanced artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithms are proposed to estimate the parameters and currents at the two terminals of the transmission line; and finally, locate faults on the transmission lines. The advanced ABC algorithms are the variants of the ABC algorithm proposed to improve its exploitation ability. This results in the enhancement of the convergence value and reduction of the iterations required. The numerical results and comparisons confirm the effectiveness of the proposal.